By Catherine Yong
There is a huge focus on Oracle partners this year. Their event extends for the whole week instead of running for just one day like in previous years, and as many as five specific cloud solutions, along with an Oracle Cloud Partner Program were announced for partners to work on and go to market with.
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Very briefly, these five solutions are cloud builder specialisations which enables partners to build private clouds for customers, the Oracle Referral Program which pays a fee for every successful registration of a customer, Resale Program or revenue from customer renewals, Rapid Start and platform services for ISVs. As many as 5000 partners are present this year.
The increased emphasis on Partners this year was also implied by Ellison who during his keynote, announced more solutions which were designed to fulfil partner and customer demand for it. According to the CEO, Oracle started going to the cloud in 2004 with the Fusion applications project, which is the modern platform Oracle saw it required to deliver a complete suite of modern cloud apps.
“By 2011, it got to the point we could announce and deliver cloud services at the platform level (PaaS) and application level (SaaS). But in the first year of delivering cloud service, we discovered it wasn’t enough to simply be an app and platform provider.”
IaaS at last…
Infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) was the missing piece, and finally Oracle is offering it as part of their cloud offering, “…because customers who run SaaS and PaaS had said they needed to run certain kind of custom apps and move some of their existing apps to the cloud.”
The natural evolution seemed to be to offer IaaS, one of the big announcements out of Oracle during OOW this year. Ellison had said, “People who want to take cloud seriously and take it as alternative, need a combination of SaaS, PaaS and IaaS.”
Private cloud too
Oracle is also listening to the regulated industries like FSIs and that they want cloud capabilities on their own premises and tucked away behind their firewalls. Enter Oracle’s Private Cloud offering , which is exactly identical to Oracle’s Cloud solution in terms of the infrastructure hardware and software. According to Ellison, OPC is an extension of Oracle’s Cloud and would install on customer premises with excess capacity even.
Multi-tenancy at the right level
The third big announcement from Oracle is a multi-tenant database for the cloud that took more than 4 years to develop and is expected to arrive in 2013. The Oracle 12c database enables multi-tenancy at what Ellison described is at the ‘right layer’ which is the database (DB) layer. What he dubbed as ‘early SaaS companies’ like Salesforce.com, had implemented multi-tenancy at the application level. “There are problems with that; multi-tenancy at the application layer is bad.”
Working on the notion of container database, which will hold a number of pluggable DBs that are separate and private, Oracle 12c is fundamentally new architecture that uses 1/6th as much hardware and will run 5 times more DBs. Ellison also said besides the cost efficiency benefits of multi-tenancy, DB tools and some security features which could not work before on separate DBs, now will on Oracle’s new container DB.
The hardware foundation of Oracle Cloud
Oracle’s latest database machine, Exadata X3, is designed to store all of an organisation’s DBs, in in-memory state. “Everything is in semiconductor memory,” described Ellison.
With 4x more flash memory, bigger I/O capacity and increased read/write speeds, the company is claiming much better performance and more economical pricing than their competitor’s solutions.
Other OOW ’12 articles by EITN
* First Thoughts on OOW ’12: The Importance of Playing Nice
Enterprise IT News is in San Francisco as Oracle’s guest to Oracle Open World 2012
